The passing of “The Fugitive Slave Bill” adds strength to our cause. This measure has shocked every human heart; it has libelled humanity; it has sunk the Republican below most of the tyrants that have ever scourged society; it has insulted the world, and blasphemed the Eternal. It commands and compels free men to become informers and kidnappers, and thus degrades them below the meanest of our race. It is an attempt to render freedom the slave of slavery. A viler law has never degraded any statute book. However, its iniquity and its cruelty have aroused thousands to action who before were asleep; and when the history of the emancipation of American slaves shall be written, the narrator will triumphantly relate that the infamous “Fugitive Slave Bill” very greatly hastened this glorious consummation.
We have also another material aid in the clerical teachings of pro-slavery priests and preachers. We shall hereafter have to thank Dr. Spring, of New York; Dr. Parker, of Philadelphia; Dr. Stuart, of Andover; Dr. Spencer, of Brooklyn; the Right Rev. Bishop Hopkins, of Vermont; and a host of other reverends; for their advocacy of the cause of slavery. This outrage on Christianity by its own ministers has shocked the whole Christian world. Even the planters despise these sycophants. To hear men in the sacred desk, and in the name of the Redeemer of the world, advocate a system which cherishes ignorance, vice, debauchery, dishonesty, and murder, out-Herods anything that was ever taught by the most depraved heathens and infidels. Even Pagans had their dark groves and other midnight recesses for their sensual orgies. No atheist or barbarian has yet taught that the infant should be torn from the breast of its mother, and sold like a swine to the murderous dealer in human flesh. It was left for the 19th century, and doctors of divinity in a Christian garb, to arrive at this decree of blasphemy, impiety, and immorality. Well, we thank them for their teachings, we congratulate them for their boldness in iniquity, and we will repeat their sayings until we make every ear in Christendom tingle with their presumption and inhumanity.
We have thus briefly shown that the friends of the slave have every thing on their side, and may now make a noble stand in the cause of liberty. Providence is remarkably appearing on their behalf, and pointing out the path of duty and victory. “Is not the Lord gone up before us.” As far as England is concerned, the odium of an anti-slavery movement has passed away. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” has rekindled the zeal of the lukewarm, and baptized with holy fire myriads who before cared nothing for the negro. Let us only do our duty, and this foul blot on humanity and daring insult to the Deity shall ere long become the history of a by-gone age; and a few years hence the system shall be deemed too monstrous to be believed but as a myth of some misanthrope who felt a malignant pleasure in libelling his species.
[ENTERED AT STATIONERS’ HALL.]
John Cassell, Ludgate-hill.
[1]. A son of that distinguished friend of humanity, William Wilberforce.
[2]. “Take counsel, execute judgment; make thy shadow as the night in the midst of the noon-day; hide the outcasts; bewray not him that wandereth. Let my outcasts dwell with thee, Moab; be thou a covert to them, from the face of the spoiler.”—Isaiah xvi. 3, 4.
[3]. “Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me.”—Jesus Christ. Matt. xxv. 45.
[4]. “Is it not that thou deal thy bread to the hungry, and that thou bring the poor that are cast out to thy house? when thou seest the naked that thou cover him? and that thou hide not thyself from thine own flesh?” “If thou take away from the midst of thee the yoke, the putting forth of the finger, and speaking of vanity,” &c.—Isaiah lviii. 6–9.